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Video shows SpaceX's latest landing failure as Falcon 9 rocket is engulfed in smoke on drone ship

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Elon Musk has released video footage of SpaceX's latest landing attempt, in which the aerospace firm lost a Falcon 9 rocket. The Falcon 9 took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Wednesday, carrying two communications satellites into orbit. Looks like early liquid oxygen depletion caused engine shutdown just above the deck pic.twitter.com/Sa6uCkpknY Head of SpaceX, Elon Musk, has released video footage showing just how close the first stage of this week's rocket launch came to successfully landing on the floating barge. The Falcon 9 appeared to be on course for an upright landing before it was lost in clouds of smoke.


1979 Revolution: Black Friday: Gripping Adventure Game Puts You in the Iranian Revolution

WIRED

Navid Khonsari wants to make honest video games. Not just games that say something about the world, but games that draw on real events and bring a documentary approach to an interactive experience. "The 1979 Iranian Revolution is a defining moment in the twentieth century," he says. "The rifts it started define what the Middle East is now and what the West is. The moral decisions: who do you protect, who don't you protect?"


The Rise of Manufacturing Marks the Fall of Globalization

#artificialintelligence

Whether you're reading this article on a smartphone, tablet or laptop, chances are the device in front of you contains components from at least six countries spanning three or more continents. Its sleek exterior belies the complicated and intricate set of internal parts that only a global supply chain can provide. Over the past century, finished products made in a single country have become increasingly hard to find as globalization -- weighted a term as it is -- has stretched supply chains to the ends of the Earth. Now, anything from planes, trains and automobiles to computers, cellphones and appliances can trace its hundreds of pieces to nearly as many companies around the world. And its assembly might take place in a different country still.


'Squishy Finger' Soft Robot Hands Allow Sampling of Delicate Corals

National Geographic

Their squishy robotic hands can gather coral samples more delicately than robots, and in places humans can't reach. Developed with support from a National Geographic Innovation Challenge Grant, the hands were first tested in tanks in March 2015 and then taken to the Red Sea in May. After a successful expedition, Wood and Gruber hope the technology may have even broader applications.


Machine Learning Across Cultures: Modeling the Adoption of Financial Services for the Poor

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Recently, mobile operators in many developing economies have launched "Mobile Money" platforms that deliver basic financial services over the mobile phone network. While many believe that these services can improve the lives of the poor, a consistent difficulty has been identifying individuals most likely to benefit from access to the new technology. Here, we combine terabyte-scale data from three different mobile phone operators from Ghana, Pakistan, and Zambia, to better understand the behavioral determinants of mobile money adoption. Our supervised learning models provide insight into the best predictors of adoption in three very distinct cultures. We find that models fit on one population fail to generalize to another, and in general are highly context-dependent. These findings highlight the need for a nuanced approach to understanding the role and potential of financial services for the poor.


Data scientist dreams up ideas and then brings them to life - JobsBlog: Life at Microsoft

#artificialintelligence

Anirudh Koul's grandfather was slowly losing his ability to see. By 2014, he was having a hard time recognizing Koul's face in their weekly Skype calls bridging the vast distance between the Silicon Valley, where Koul is a data scientist at Microsoft, and the elderly man's home in New Delhi. So Koul started reading up on the challenges of vision loss and thinking about how the recent advances in deep learning, a potential-packed area of machine learning, could help give people a new way to recognize what's around them without actually seeing it. That was the modest beginning of Seeing AI. Two years later, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella introduced the budding technology to thundering applause at this year's Build conference.


The old-school approach behind St. Lucia's 'Help Me Run Away'

Engadget

When I spoke to the director, he referenced movies including the original Jurassic Park, where the combination of CGI for longer shots and live-action robots for close up. The behind the scenes video below shows how puppeteering on a custom-built rig or green suited dancers wearing the shoes created movement that's realistic, without the uncanny valley that overused computer renderings can produce, even in current movies. There are some instances of computer generated rendering for close-ups, like when the shoes are waving their shoelaces in the breeze. As described by St. Lucia's Jean-Philip Grobler, he and Norton took their cues not just from cheesy 80s movies (note the quick zooms) but also Pixar's knack for bringing forth a hidden life from everyday objects. The human characters in the video are played by the rest of the band, transforming the song from Grobler's idea of his own journey from South Africa to the US, to something else entirely.


Pistorius walks without prosthetic legs in court

BBC News

Oscar Pistorius has removed his prosthetic legs in court to demonstrate how he walks without them. The athlete's lawyer, Barry Roux, asked the court's permission. The hearing is reconsidering Pistorius' sentence after a court found him guilty of murdering Reeva Steenkamp, overturning an earlier manslaughter verdict.


Mellanox Announces ConnectX-5, the Next Generation of 100G InfiniBand and Ethernet Smart Interconnect Adapter

#artificialintelligence

ConnectX-5 introduces smart offloading engines that enable the highest application performance while maximizing data center return on investment. Furthermore, ConnectX-5 is the first PCI Express 3.0 and 4.0 compatible adapter, enabling greater flexibility and future-proofing for the data center. With the exponential growth of data and the increase in businesses that takes advantage of real-time data processing for high performance computing (HPC), data analytics, machine learning, national security and'Internet of Things' applications, the market needs not only the fastest interconnect available, but also interconnect intelligence that can perform data algorithms as the data moves throughout the data center. The new intelligent ConnectX-5 100G adapter enables the most advanced real-time in-network computing engines to unleash business opportunities and new technological developments. "The new ConnectX-5 100G adapter further enables high performance, data analytics, deep learning, storage, Web 2.0 and more applications to perform data-related algorithms on the network to achieve the highest system performance and utilization," said Gilad Shainer, vice president, marketing at Mellanox Technologies.


babylon's artificial intelligence is put to test (and it outperformed clinicians in triaging patients)

#artificialintelligence

This week, in a public test, we put the Triage capability of babylon's new AI function to test against some of the UK's top triage nurses and junior doctors. Professor Irwin Nazareth, The Academic Doctoral Research Committee Chair of the Health Education England and NIHR examined one of Britain's most senior A&E nurses, an Oxford-educated Junior Doctor and babylon's new'Check' feature to see who provided the most accurate and fastest triage assessment in front of the UK's top consumer, health and technology media. This was a live demonstration of an extensive set of tests published in an academic research paper, that showed babylon's'Check'feature to be safe in 100% of cases, 13% more accurate than a doctor, 17% more accurate than a nurse, and performing significantly faster 89% of the time. "Check a Symptom" is already the most popular feature on the babylon app. In the UK alone, it has been used around 20,000 times in just three weeks (that is about 3% of the usage of nhs 111 nationally in the same period).